The Catbird Seat (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

At a glance:

“The Catbird Seat” combines Thurber's interests in baseball and in the Walter Mitty character. The mild-mannered protagonist of this story, Mr. Martin, is afflicted in his workplace by a loud, aggressive woman named Ulgine Barrows. Although she has been hired to reduce company expenditures and thus constitutes a threat to his security, he hates most her habit of taunting him with colorful expressions drawn from the lexicon of Red Barber, the real-life play-by-play announcer of the Brooklyn Dodgers. “Are you scraping the bottom of the pickle barrel?” “Are you sitting in the catbird seat?” Pleasant enough coming from Barber, these utterances, incessantly reiterated by his nemesis, convince Martin that he must kill her.

After going home from work one evening and drinking a glass of milk, Martin walks to the woman's apartment and barges in. She, of course unafraid of him, notices his extreme nervousness and offers him a drink. While she is in the kitchen, he cannot find the weapon he had hoped to locate in her living room. He accepts the drink and a cigarette, neither of which he has ever indulged in before. Beginning to boast that he intends to murder their mutual employer, he boldly “confirms” her suspicion that he is on dope. He then leaves, uttering, “Not a word about this.” When promptly the next morning Barrows complains to their boss about her visitor's behavior, Martin denies the allegations. Growing hysterical and finally violent, Barrows must be forcibly evicted from the premises, and Martin returns quietly to his work.

That Martin will fail in his attempt to kill his tormenter there is never any doubt, but he cannily turns his failure into a triumph. In Thurber's version of the eternal war of the sexes, “The Catbird Seat” marks the signal example of a masculine victory—one that, given the bullying nature of his antagonist, the reader is inclined to celebrate.

Bibliography

Fensch, Thomas, ed. Conversations with James Thurber. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

Grauer, Neil A. Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Holmes, Charles S. The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber. New York: Atheneum, 1972.

Kinney, Harrison. James Thurber: His Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.

Kinney, Harrison, and Rosemary A. Thurber, eds. The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

Rosen, Michael J., ed. Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor, and Himself. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

Tobias, Richard C. The Art of James Thurber. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1970.